After reading my last fragment, a friend of mine e-mailed me saying how he noticed the extent of his negative reaction to use of "male" and "female" as nouns. (They're fine as adjectives.) Which I agree with, though it looks like my reaction isn't as strong as his, so I was surprised to hear that I'd made that mistake; looking at the fragment, though, there's an inappropriate use of "female" in the second sentence. Oops.

If I'd caught that myself, I would have just edited it out, even after publication. But now that he's pointed it out, doing that would feel like I'm hiding my mistakes. So, instead, I'm taking the opposite tack: after all, what is this blog about if not publicly embarrassing myself?

(And, of course, it's nice to have an extent to anonymously talk about another friend of mine. Or at least I find the idea strangely amusing: how long will it be before somebody who doesn't know me at all can trace out all of my friendships and their interconnections here?)